Southampton: European Premier League could damage Saints hugely

Liverpool and Manchester United’s push to start a European Premier League was confirmed on Tuesday afternoon but could have hugely damaging effects for clubs like Southampton.

A report from Sky Sports has suggested that negotiations are well underway with some of the biggest clubs from around Europe in the hope of starting a European competition to potentially replace the Champions League.

A league format would apparently be used with 18 teams battling it out to qualify for the resulting knockout stages that follow. Crucially, however, it would seem to be an exclusively for clubs of the size of United and Liverpool.

This could potentially leave other English teams with no European qualification opportunities due to loss of finance and interest in the Champions League and Europa League, so it is surprising that Sky report that FIFA are backing the plans.

With the biggest five or six clubs possibly playing in this league, most of Saints’ revenue from TV income could be ripped away almost instantly.

The likes of Sky and BT would surely prefer to be showing games that interest the most fans – they know that the biggest fanbases will be represented in these European Premier League games so will choose that over clubs like Saints playing in the English Premier League.

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Therefore, they would potentially withdraw most of their interest in showing domestic football and plow their funds into those lucrative European games.

Looking at Saints’ most recently released financial accounts will show us exactly how a reduction in TV money would affect them and other in a similar situation.

Via Companies House, we can see that their turnover during the 2018/19 season was £144m. Official Premier League figures then reveal that £104m of this was TV money, leaving just £40m generated by the club from its own operations.

The accounts also list payments made to the men’s first-team in bonuses and wages as £86.1m, confirming that they are reliant on television fees to pay and keep the players they currently have.

Taking away half or more of that TV money – for example – would clearly mean that Saints could not operate like they are currently and would have to undertake a huge scaling back of their business operations.

If there is a silver lining in this situation, it is that the Premier League, most of its clubs and many, many fans will fight this idea all the way.

Stakeholders of the English top-flight will want to fight to keep their product as a valuable one, and the recent meeting that threw out “Project Big Picture” was a good indicator of the power of the rest of the league put together.

Via a report yesterday from the Daily Mail, Saints were said to be furious with United and Liverpool given that they are “close” to securing a financial takeover.